I realized i just been living in a lie. Been coloring with the wrong icc profile for almost 6 years. Its because all this time i had a secondary monitor like 8 years old that ive never notice it. I just bought recently a cheap and amazing monitor 23 inches aoc, and noticed that my cintiq tablet colors looked washed away.

I asked myself why all my drawings in deviant art dont look like in my cintiq, they look washed away or burned.

Because of two problems.

I have all my files in adobe 1998 icc, which its good for printing but not web browsing, but the most horrible one, its that the cintiq21ux.icc that came in my cd was really wrong. Got the correct one in a wacom europe page, my cintiq its first generation, so new drivers sucked hard doesnt work.

Also warning for those that have same old cintiq like me, new drivers screw up the pen, cuts the pressure in half or gives weird pressure to it-, and worst ive been coloring with pen pressure wrong and color really bad.

I had been coloring blind. The default icc that comes in the cd its like 5kb, you need to get the one almost 500kb they are named the same, but its a huge difference, when i change it i noticed all my drawings looked so burn out.

Ohhh the driver i think worked perfectly for my old cintiq and intuos 3 its this driver WacomTablet_6.1.6-5.

Because wacom released a new cintiq 21ux it rewritted the files on top of this old one, so new drivers really mess with the pens pressure and performance, and its not installing the correct icc, so you have to get that file and install it manually.

Spread the word if you know other people with cintiq 21ux(first generation), cintiq 12wx or intuos 3.

Now i can see colors perfectly, after going to color manager of windows 7 and i can control perfectly the pens pressure.

Never use the ICC Profiles from the company, create yours instead, that way you will get the best color results, I´ve never used preset ICC profiles because they will never match the printed version because all monitors have different settings. If you don´t like manual calibration you can always try using a Spyder from Data Color, those things are amazing for color correction.

I have the same type of problem with my 12wx Its 5 years old (I got it used, but new condition) and everything comes out fine on it, but when I look at my monitor, (a netbook) the looks stretched and faded!

A long time ago, I buy a little cintiq, I immidiatly saw the problem with colors ( I saw they are not the real colors ) , I spend 2 months to try to fix it and then, I went to a conv and Wacom was there, and all the little cintiq was so dark, they told me " that's normal youg girl ! it's to make the picture more beautifull ! " Errr, ok ... What ?

then I saw pride people showing photo of their cintiq on their desk on the Internet, and the problem with the color was so obvious !! I didn't understand how so much poeple could deal with it ... x__o ...

Few days ago I buy myself cintiq12wx and got the same problem as you.everthing look god on my samsung sync master but on cintiq colours are to warm and everything is bit dim,or washed as you write that.thanks for the writeing this.hopeffully i'll be able to colour something coz like for now I'm dissapointed and how hard become colouring now orz.

dude I had the same problem for a whiles now, i noticed it too when i got my cintiq and the colors never seemed right, never knew how to fix it though. Gonna check around for the solution, thanks for clearing it up.

This! Thank you for posting this! A friend of mine has been complaining about this issue for about a year now, and I'm glad that someone else has had AND fixed the issue! Thanks once more, and I can't wait to see your new work after this fix!

in my screen they look less saturated, but after changing the profile i noticed how oversaturated its my work, helped that ive upload everything in adobe1998 which desaturates the drawing, but still not the real color i see here.

I have the 12 one, and the colors seemed wrong, I tried to correct them many times by playing around the settings, but I don't get it right, like if it's kinda red-ish, I try to balance then and it becomes blue-ish or green-ish what should I do?